On the subject of making money...
Someone made a stock notification thing at
http://bawsaq.hviidnet.com/ which will show you the price, and let you sign up to get an email when a stock hits a certain price.
Also, realized what should be a really easy way to avoid losses in the stock market. Whenever you're about to quit playing, make sure you sell all stocks, make a save game, then buy up whichever stock you choose and save the game in another slot. Next time you boot up then, the prices will update. If you made money, great, sell your stocks and you profit. If you lost money, load your save from before you bought the stock and you've got your cash back in your bank account. It would suck to do this while you're actually playing since you'd lose anything you did in the meantime. But if you do it when you're not playing anyway, you lose any risk of losing money.
On that note, I noticed my Bawsaq prices weren't updating very often. Maybe once an hour or less. And they seemed to change at different times than the website above I mentioned. So I'm guessing it only updates once an hour or so, or whenever you launch the game. So tested it by doing the saves I mentioned above. Dumped all my stocks, saved, then bought $12 million in Pisswasser stocks between my 3 characters. Saved again, quit the game. Relaunched it, and the prices updated and I made 5% return. If we figured out the frequency of stock updates when playing the game, you could also make money by doing the save-purchase-relaunch about 5-10 minutes before your price would update.
It also would allow one person to relaunch their game and check the new stock prices, and tell everyone else what the new prices are, and then they can go make purchases while their system is still on the previous hour's price.